Chapter 03: Moving to the Provider Side of Insurance
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Description
Dr. Leach explains that his role as Vice President of Marketing for Prudential in Nashville (1980 – ’85) gave him his first experience with the health-care provider functions of insurance companies. He describes his experience managing all parts of the health-care delivery system. He then explains that his career expanded once again when Prudential purchases Merrill Lynch’s real estate division: he moved to California to become the Chief Financial Officer of the Prudential Real Estate Affiliates. When Prudential asked him to return to Newark, he says his family did not want to move again. At this point, he moved fully into the provider side of health care, developing the professional management of physician’s offices.
Identifier
LeachL_01_20121115_ C03
Publication Date
11-5-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD , Oral History Interview, November 05, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Professional Path; The Administrator; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Evolution of Career; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Yeah, that’s very true. Let’s go back and pick up that, because I was really interested when I was looking at your background and that shift between moving from the setting up of HMOs to slowly moving into more of the health delivery side. That seemed like a really interesting change in your own career path. Let me just ask you some other background questions and then kind of get to that part of your own development. First, for the record, where were you born and when?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
I was born in Bridgeton, New Jersey, Bridgeton Hospital, in 1948.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
And did you grow up in New Jersey?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
And in that same town? What’s the name of that town again?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Well, no. Where I grew up is a little town called Port Norris, and if you can imagine Cape May, the cape coming out, it’s right there in what us locals would call the armpit of the cape, right as the cape comes out. Bridgeton was the county seat. Port Norris was a port town, maybe 1,000 people or so.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
And that’s Richton, R-I-C-H-T-O-N?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Bridge.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Bridgeton, okay.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Bridge, B-R-I-D-G-E.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Okay, I’m glad I asked.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Southern New Jersey. It’s the county seat of Cumberland County.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
And tell me a bit about your family and what you feel in your family background kind of tracked you into leadership.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Well, my father was an oysterman on the Delaware Bay. He had his own boat. I grew up on the water. I’ve always been partial to boating and do a lot of it. Well, I don’t do as much as I’d like. I’ve got to work too. He was a quiet man. He worked outdoors. The months in which you harvest oysters are months that have Rs in them, so you’re in the Delaware Bay anywhere from September through April. That’s not the nicest time to be in the Delaware Bay.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
That’s hard work.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
And then when the oyster season was over, we’d go crabbing or fishing or whatever. There was a lot on the water. Neither of my parents is still alive. My mother lived to be ninety-two, and she was the spiritual backbone of the family. It’s not that Dad wasn’t, but it was very important to her that we all grow up in the church, and we had five of us. I was the oldest, and I had four sisters.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
What was the denomination you were raised in?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Baptist. I had a very Ozzie and Harriet type of family. It was blue collar. My dad—and by the time I was twelve, I was helping him on the boat, but it was a great life. It was a good town to grow up in. It was fun being on the water. I was never micromanaged by my parents. My mother was always skittish but my father—I had a boat when I was twelve and he had told me—it was like a dinghy only it was wood. It was about that size, and I had a 3.6-horsepower Scott-Atwater outboard motor. These are antiques today, and in the Delaware Bay if you go out of the river, the Maurice River, into the bay and the tide is flowing out, 3.6 horsepower isn’t enough to get you back in. He had told me—he’d be down working on the boats on Saturday or Sunday, and I’d go out on the river and play around on my boat, and he would tell me, “Don’t go out into the bay.” Of course, we used to go out all the time in his boat. He never explained to me why I shouldn’t go out in the bay, so this one day I couldn’t resist. I went out in the bay and I pretty quickly found out—there was an island where the river split, and instead of getting washed out I was able to get up behind the island, but I couldn’t get back in until the tide changed, which was probably a couple of hours. I came back in, and I wasn’t going to say anything to Dad. I figured out why I wasn’t supposed to go out in the bay now because of the tide, so I tied the boat up and went over, and he’s working on the engine. He’s changing the oil or something, and he didn’t even look up. He just said, “So how was the bay?”
I said, “Well, I figured out why you don’t want me to go out there.” He says, “Yeah. Let’s not tell your mom about this, okay?” He was very enabling, and I had a lot of fun, a lot of great adventures. I went to this one men’s retreat when I lived out in California, and it was one of these things where folks would talk about their childhood and all that, and I was shocked at some of the adversity that some of these adult men grew up with. It was one of those kumbaya things where they’re expecting you to share, and I’m sorry, but I had a very normal childhood. It was Ozzie and Harriet.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Call me boring.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
I don’t have any good stories to tell you.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
That’s funny. What did you major in when you went to college, and how did you track into your career?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Business? I could not say I was driven to be a business person. I kind of looked at the choices, and I took some accounting courses in high school, and it was easy for me. I got it. I understood the theory. It’s kind of a natural thing and I actually took enough—I needed three more credits to have a dual degree in accounting, and when I tell people that they’re like, “Why didn’t you do that?” The only good it would do me is if I wanted to sit for the CPA, but back then, and still very similar to today, you had to work in an auditing shop and audit, and that’s not what I wanted to do. It was the business side that appealed to me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
What did you see yourself—what was it that you visualized when you saw yourself thinking about that business side?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
A generalist. I didn’t have—I knew the financials. Understanding the numbers was important, because that’s what makes businesses differ. It’s the bottom line. I knew that that came natural to me. I had a good feel for that. But I never really saw myself being an accountant. I never really saw myself being a CFO. I saw myself as being a business person. It was more general, broader, and in my career at one point in time I was an assembly language programmer. You tell anyone that, and that’s almost before anyone in the computer age knew—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
I’ve never even heard the term.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
It’s a very arcane language. It’s very close to machine language. It’s very close to turning the bits and bytes off and on. It’s a tedious language to write in. I did that for a while. It was kind of a process of, okay, that’s not what I want to do. But it was all within the business structure, and most of it has been in healthcare. I spent three years as a CFO in Prudential’s real estate subsidiary, but other than that, it was all healthcare. And your comment earlier about going to the delivery side, it’s interesting, because when you track my career, that’s what I did, but when we were starting HMOs, I saw myself as being part of a delivery system. These were health maintenance organizations. We primarily did group model HMOs where you—it’s like Kaiser. Kaiser is actually a group model where the delivery side is very much connected to the insurance side. We call them integrated health plans today. That’s a little bit broader. That includes the hospital and all. I was on the business side of those transactions, but we actually developed medical groups that we worked with. Miller Medical Group in Nashville was Prudential’s second HMO. The first one was in the building that we imploded. I came down here to set up their financial systems.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Okay.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
The big, distinct change was coming here, because that did get me more out of the commercial world and into a different environment.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Into an academic world. Now, you got your BS in ’73 from Rutgers, and then your MBA was 1976 from Widener University. Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
And where is Widener?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Widener is Chester, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia. It was freshly named Widener University. It had been Pennsylvania Military College, PMC. But during the Vietnam era, they ran into funding difficulties. The Widener family is a well-known, mainline Philadelphia family that donated a lot of money, and basically the school chose to change their name.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Interesting. Now, as I was looking at your background, you had a very long relationship with the Prudential Insurance Company.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Twenty-five years.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Yeah, 1967 to 1993, so ’67, that’s even before you graduated from college. Tell me about that because I remember when I was reading some of the background materials—and actually, there was a letter that John Mendelsohn wrote to the faculty when you were going to come to the institution. He mentioned the long relationship with Prudential. Could you tell me about what you did for them? And part of the reason I’m asking is because obviously your long relationship with medically related insurance was part of the reason that you were so perfect for the position here. I’m interested in the development of that perspective and looking down the road to what you were bringing to MD Anderson.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
I actually—like I mentioned, we were a blue-collar family. There was an oyster blight in the Delaware Bay that basically killed off the oysters. They came back as I was a young man, so we didn’t have a lot of finances for me to go to school. I worked, and I went to Cumberland County College and have an associate’s degree from Cumberland County College, a two-year school, and then I transferred to Rutgers. I did one year—I had enough money to do one year full time at Cumberland County College, but all the rest of my schooling has been at night or part time. I went to Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. They have a branch there, and one of the things I discovered is I had some daytime professors, but it was mostly nighttime. The vast majority was evening school, and they had adjunct faculty for the evening school, and these are people that are out recruiting HR or information systems or they’re the finance people, and they come in and teach the finance course or the human relations course. I found that the daytime teachers, it was a lot of theory, which was good. But the nighttime teachers had made it work. They put it into practice, and I thought I got a very good education, because it was primarily people that had done it.
And then I went on for an MBA at Widener, and that was in the evenings. That was over the bridge from Southern New Jersey. It was all working during the day and then driving to school and driving back. It was roughly about a forty-mile trip for both Rutgers and Widener. When I first started at Widener, the choice was either a ferry to cross the Delaware River, or you had to go through Wilmington, Delaware, and come up, which added about a half a dozen miles to the trip. But my favorite story as my—we have three sons—as our sons were growing up I would tell them that I had to drive through three states to get my degree. (laughs) Well, three states is like from here to Katy.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
True dedication. Of course it was.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Fortunately they had just opened—I think it was the Betsey Ross Bridge the second semester I was going to Widener, and that made the commute a lot easier. But when I got the bachelor’s degree, I was working with Prudential, and I was working in their Medicaid and Medicare office in Millville, New Jersey, which is where I went to high school. I thought, “Ah, a college graduate. I’ll go find myself a good job.” I went out and interviewed and stuff, and I found that I was further along in my career with Prudential than I would be just coming out of college, and Prudential had been good about moving me ahead. When I got the MBA I thought, “My ticket to Wall Street.” They promoted me to manager of the Medicaid claim operation, and I was significantly ahead of what I would be doing as a freshly minted MBA—perhaps not if it was a premier degree, Harvard or something like that—so I wound up staying with Prudential. I only really tested the waters a couple of times, and when I got the bachelor’s degree, they had put me on this kind of fast-track program for high-potential people. They would move you every two to three years so you’ll see—I don’t know how detailed the resume was that they sent you, but basically every two to three years I was doing something different, and it was great development for me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
What were some of the lessons that you learned there? How did that develop your skill set?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Well, I think it made me a much broader person. I’ll give you an example. I guess I was still in my twenties. I was probably twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I was just about thirty, and I was working in the corporate office in Newark, New Jersey, and I was a similar language programmer, but I did a lot of systems design work. I did our first online system where you used the cathode ray tube that Prudential had. I was on this fast-track program, and I was literally just down the hall from the senior vice president of the group department, one of maybe twenty people that ran the company. The program was every so often he’d call you in, and it would be more like three to six months, how are you doing, are you happy, what are you working on, that kind of thing. At twenty-nine at one of these discussions, I said, “I think I’m being stereotyped. I think people were thinking that I’m just an IS guy and that I enjoy it.” I didn’t want to be stereotyped. I’m only twenty-nine years old. It was more my imagination than anything else, I think, so he asked me, “What would you like to do?” I said, “I really don’t know. I mean, you know the company. I want to be a generalist.” By now, the vision was coming more into focus. I didn’t want to be the techie. I didn’t want to be the one putting the numbers on, the debits on the left and the credits on the right, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and businessman was too nebulous. I said, “You know the company better than I do. You know me. You know what my talents are and what my limitations are. What do you think I should do?” And of course, this flies in the face of never asking a question with a question, and also, the corporate America structure back then was very much the idea of looking for people that—I want to be a—you know. He said, “Well, let me give it some thought,” and we left it at that. Two weeks later on a Friday he walks into my cubbyhole. He would have closed the door if there was a door to close, I’m sure, and he said, “How would you like to be the vice president of marketing in our new HMO in Nashville, Tennessee?”
And I got a look on my face. It must have been a shocked look because he watched my body language, and the next thing he said—I didn’t say anything. The next thing he said was, “You said you wanted something different. This is about as different as I could find.” I thought about it over the weekend, and I came back in on Monday and told him, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Someone who grew up in Southern New Jersey finally made it to Newark, New Jersey, of all places. This is where Prudential’s headquarters were. I’m going to Nashville. What I was doing—I’d done two things, basically. I was in charge of the financials for approved care, but we had one HMO right here. Our first one was right here in Houston, and I’d flown down here and set up the books and that kind of thing, and I’d done some of the systems work, or they were done under my design. Now I’m going to be the VP of marketing. Really? Of HMO? They sent me to—it was called—the acronym was GROC, the GROC place. It was Group Rep Orientation Course. One of my classmates is now one of the four executive vice presidents at Prudential. Another one—she wasn’t really a classmate. She was a lawyer, but she is off that genre. We were kind of in the same program at Prudential. She’s now their general counsel. It was a good training, a good group, and that’s an example of how it broadened me as the boy who grew up on the Maurice River running around in a dinghy to somebody who had more experience.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Well, it took a little—I don’t know—courage or throwing caution to the wind—
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Courage or stupidity, one or the other.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
—to ask the question, to kind of go against traditional corporate wisdom and ask the question. But it ended up being a great opportunity.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Yeah, it did. It opened the doors. It’s almost one begets another. One opportunity leads to the next.
Segment 3
A: Professional Path
Approx. 26 minutes
Moving to the Provider Side of Insurance
Story Codes
A: Professional Path
A: The Administrator
A: Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents
C: Evolution of Career
C: Professional Practice
C: The Professional at Work
A: Overview
A: Definitions, Explanations, Translations
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Tell me about some of the other experiences that were really key in rounding out the generalist and person interested in strategy who came to MD Anderson in ’97.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
I spent a year as the vice president of marketing, and then I became the vice president of PruCare of Nashville. We were growing rapidly. The person who went there at the same time I did—we were just starting it up—he went on to Chicago to start another one in Chicago. He’s retired now but he was president of—I think it was Florida Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
What was the year that you went to Nashville? Well I guess the year is probably—
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
I think it was 1970. Is that right? I think it was ’70 to ’75. It’s probably on the resume someplace.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Yeah, let me see if I’ve got that. I’m just curious because I was wondering how you were seeing the sort of—because when you came to MD Anderson there was a serious financial issue happening with HMOs, and I’m wondering how early you began to see some of those things accumulating.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
You know, I think it wasn’t ’70. It was ’80, I think, ’80 to ’85.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Group department sales and managed care? That’s Northeastern office.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
That’s when I came back. That was ’85.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Oh, here we go, ’84 to ’85, the senior vice president, Prudential Healthcare Plan Inc. Built Southeastern HMO operations and then also the vice president—this is ’80 to ’84—vice president of Prudential Healthcare Plan, PruCare of Nashville and then various positions of increasing responsibility. That’s it. It was really looking like ’80 to ’85 sort of the period—
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
And I didn’t get that granular in the resume, but there were really three jobs I had there. I went there as the director of marketing. I then became the vice president as we went operational, and within a couple of years I became a senior vice president for the Southeastern region. That was the first one you read. But that kind of really solidified the financial bit. I designed the systems and all, but I had responsibility for the bottom line, and we had profit and loss statements, and we were expected to be profitable. That’s where it all came together, plus I now had some experience with marketing, although not a whole lot. But I did sell—the biggest account they ever sold was the City of Nashville. The other thing was that’s where I got some personal experience with the provider side, because we did business with Hospital Corporation of America, and we did business with the Miller Medical Group, which was a freestanding physicians group. We used one of HCA’s hospitals as our main hospital, but we established relationships with Vanderbilt. They were our tertiary care center, Baptist Hospital in Nashville. That was really a good job, because I could see all the pieces coming together.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
And what was it that you were seeing? I mean, you have to understand, I think, you’re talking to someone, and there are going to be a lot of people listening to this interview who probably don’t even know what questions to ask. They just don’t have any kind of window into the systems that you’re talking about. Could you explain more about what it was that you were working with in setting up the HMO and then why the provider side added such a different piece to that puzzle?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Well, what I brought to it already was the financial background, but that’s just one piece. Even of what I had on the administrative side, finance is one thing, but it takes so much more. At Anderson it’s clinical operations, it’s research. All those things have to come together. Well, the piece that I pretty much owned was the business side, and that job with the HMO with PruCare told me I had the sales side, which we really don’t have here. We have a marketing area but you’re not selling—one of the major pool groups, say, Shell or Exxon, although we do arrangements with them, you’re not selling them on getting all their care through an HMO. I had that experience. Then as the vice president of the HMO, we had to negotiate contracts to arrange for all these services. We had to have the physicians, and we went with a multispecialty group. They’re in Nashville. They provide primary care and a lot of the surgery, and they were attached to an HCA hospital. We had to have a contract with them, because while they were a corridor or two to get down to the hospital, they were physically attached. They were two different legal entities, and then you had to make arrangement for tertiary care. Neonatology was done at Vanderbilt. Saint Thomas did a lot of the cardiology. Baptist did the OB-GYN. There were specialty things that you wouldn’t necessarily have done at what was a general care HCA hospital. You had to arrange for all those services. It was a Kaiser-like model, so everything that Kaiser does on a much bigger scale.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
I actually don’t know what you mean when you say Kaiser-like model. What does that mean?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Do you know who Kaiser Permanente is?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
Yes.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Well, they’re an integrated healthcare delivery system, because the doctors aren’t in their employ. They’re in the employ of the Permanente Medical Group. It’s called Kaiser Permanente. Permanente Medical Group has a contract with Kaiser to deliver the services. Now, at MD Anderson, the doctors are in our employ, and we own the hospital, so we’re more integrated than they are. But what we created was based—in PruCare—was based on the Kaiser Permanente model, which when people today point to the successful entities, you usually hear Kaiser, because it’s integrated, and they also control the health plan.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
What are the advantages of that kind of a system?
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
Well, you control all the aspects. You have responsibility for all of the aspects. PruCare was an HMO, but what we specialized in at Prudential was the insurance end. The thing that made us different from Prudential Insurance, and the reason PruCare was a subsidiary, is we were an HMO company. We arranged for the delivery of care. We didn’t own the doctors. There is a model called a staff model that the doctors would actually be in the employ of the HMO. It’s a fine difference, because Kaiser Permanente allowed people to think Kaiser owns the doctors as well. Not really. They actually have their own medical group, and they have a contractual relationship. The thing that I got out of this was how to pull all those things together, how to integrate, and it was on a reasonably manageable scale. I mean, Nashville was not L.A., thank God. From there—what did I do then? I think I went back—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD
I have subacute ’93 to ’94.
Leon Leach, MBA, PhD
I think you skipped over—I went back to Newark. Well, actually, it’s more of the process than the steps. The experience I got there was in managing all parts of the healthcare delivery system. Prudential grew up as a separate subsidiary. When it got to a certain critical mass, we integrated it with Prudential Insurance Company, and when HMOs first came out, you had to get your services there. There was no benefit if you went outside a certain area. If you had a life-threatening emergency, you could go to an emergency room, and they would pay the emergency room. But if you had any other thing wrong with you, you had to use the HMO doctors. Then they came up with—we called it PruCare Plus, and all we did was we married the HMO with an insurance plan. If you choose to go outside the HMO, you’re covered by insurance. You get the best of both worlds. It costs you a little bit more, because back then the costs for the insured side was higher than the HMO side, but when we integrated those two, it was kind of like musical chairs.
There were four senior VPs of PruCare, and there were five group insurance regions, and what wound up prevailing was the parent company of the five regional structures. I was heading the Southeastern region out of Nashville. There was no Southeastern. There was a Southeastern region within Prudential. It was in Jacksonville, and long story short, when the music ended I was the person who headed up the combined—the vice president of group insurance in Newark for the Northeastern region, which was geographically the smallest, but dollar-wise the biggest. It went by where corporations were headquartered, so Citicorp was one that we had. But as a client, I’d go to Fargo in the Dakotas, because they had a credit card place out there that had 4,000 employees.
That was interesting, because it gave me experience on a different scale. That was a much bigger national scale. The next thing in my career was Prudential bought Merrill Lynch’s real estate company. The gentleman I was telling you about who asked me what I wanted to do, he was the senior vice president of the group department, but there were four executive vice presidents, and he reported to one of those four. The individual—by then I was a full vice president with Prudential, so I was one level below the guy who asked me, “What do you want to do?” The gentleman who was my—actually, I reported directly to the executive office in my—I’m skipping a job here. I went back to Newark in the regional job, and the office I started in in Southern New Jersey in Millville, they had grown to 2,000 people, and they did all the Medicare claims for New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia, and they had offices in North Carolina and Georgia. We actually had two in Southern New Jersey. The one in Millville, my old hometown—not my old hometown, where I went to high school—was about a dozen miles north of Port Norris, and there was one in Linwood, New Jersey, which is over by Atlantic City, just across the Lakes Bay.
Anyhow, there was a promotional opportunity to run that office, and I was asked to do that, and I reported to the executive committee. I was a full vice president, not a senior vice president, because by Prudential standards, it wasn’t really big enough to warrant a senior vice president. I did that for—again, it was two to three years. All these things were two to three years, and the gentleman who I was reporting to in the executive office decided if I wanted to make the next step I needed to know something other than healthcare. What I got out of that job was Medicare and Medicaid. I’ve had experience with the insurance aspect, with the managed care aspect, the HMOs, Medicare, and Medicaid, and it wasn’t as though I was thoughtfully or consciously building this portfolio. I mean, the decisions were being made jointly by myself and whoever I worked for at Prudential at the time as to what’s the next logical step. I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “If I do X, Y, and Z, I’ll wind up in Houston, Texas.” Actually, that was the last thing I would have thought. The next opportunity was actually a real estate company. It was Merrill Lynch’s national real estate company, and we had gotten into the business—we started our own “national” company. It was considerably smaller than Merrill Lynch’s. It was based in Southern California, right outside Newport Beach. When we acquired Merrill Lynch’s company, it was like David swallowing Goliath. They were a player. We were just trying to get into it. We automatically became a player, but whenever one company buys another, they want to have control of the finances, so they asked if I’d go out there and be the CFO.
The common theme here throughout all this is that know something about the numbers. I got Medicare and Medicaid, commercial insurers, the delivery side, putting together delivery systems, and when I got to the senior vice president level in PruCare, that’s primarily what I would focus on in other cities. Nashville, I think there are five HMOs that reported to me in that region, but I started a bunch in the Northeast too when I went back up there. I think I started twenty of them. I moved to Newport Beach. Well, I moved to California and lived in Newport Beach and worked in Mission Viejo and was the CFO of their real estate company. I did that for three years, and the master plan was I would come back to corporate. In three years I’d go someplace else, most likely back to corporate, because that’s where they had the generals, and I was kind of getting to that rank, so
Recommended Citation
Leach, Leon MBA, PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 03: Moving to the Provider Side of Insurance" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1198.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1198
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